Organizing: Journaling Your Business in 4 simple steps

How to be productive is a big part of making a succesful business. It doesn’t really matter if you’re a programmer, writing blogs or any other creative business. The more effective you are as a creative professional the more success you’ll eventually have. When you are a creative for a living, concentration and focus is one of your main concerns.

In order to be productive, you need to get all the clutter in your brain off your mind, so to speak and creative people tend to have a lot on their mind all the time. The best way to get all that thinking out-of-the-way is to write it down. But that is not always as simple as it sounds. Here’s a great way to create a journal of all your work in 4 easy steps.

Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine

I subscribe to Randy’s E-zine, and in this months edition I found one of those articles that just stick. One of those pieces of text you instantly know, adds value to your writing business, whether it’s Blogging, Writing or something else. Go check out Randy’s October 2012 issue of his E-zine. There you’ll find an article called “Organizing: Journaling Your Business”. It’s a very simple method. It doesn’t require a fancy to-do program, a iPhone app and a Cloudservice. It just requires 10-15 minutes of your time each day. 10 in the morning and maybe 5 in the evening.

I’m a huge fan of Randy’s work. In the midst of blogging experts and SEO-gurus cluttering the blogosphere with their advise on “how to blog” and “how to SEO”, it’s nice to read a blog, E-zine/newsletter that actually helps you be a better writer. Whatever your content niche is. Now this one particular article is a fairly simple way to organise your writing business.

You should go read the article. If you don’t, here’s a short resume of the thing.

What you do is

Start a new document for each year you’re in business

Each morning open your document , type ind the date and write the goals of the day and maybe a few notes on whats messing about in your brain. The trick is, to empty your brain of dreams, to-do’s and other stuff that can take up your writing time.

Work hard all day long

When the day is done. Open the document again and append Done, after the to-dos, write what went well and what went bad during the day. If you missed some to-dos, copy the to the following days notes.

That’s it. More or less. Well less actually. I won’t repeat Randy’s content, just reference it. If you want to see the tips on how to set achievable goals for the day, go read the article.

I know. Don’t get me started on the guy’s website. Randy’s a writer, not a designer and that shines through on his website. But don’t let that fool you. The quality of his site is top-notch.

2 Comments

Thanks for your post! I recently started journaling as a way of exploring the challenges we face as a small business. I find that great clarity comes as I write. I sometimes have really good but random thoughts that come in the middle of my writing. I put them down but then notice feeling a bit disorganized with the information. I am ok with that generally but I am wondering if there is a journaling app out there that would allow me to assign tags to just part of my journal entry so that I can reference all my thoughts about employee training or ideas for improving our marketing together versus scanning all my journal entries for them. Are you aware of any journal applications that can do this?